Christopher Hitchens at Slate has it about right.
Money quote(s):
"The proper task of the "public intellectual" might be conceived as the responsibility to introduce complexity into the argument: the reminder that things are very infrequently as simple as they can be made to seem. But what I learned in a highly indelible manner from the events and arguments of September 2001 was this: Never, ever ignore the obvious either. To the government and most of the people of the United States, it seemed that the country on 9/11 had been attacked in a particularly odious way (air piracy used to maximize civilian casualties) by a particularly odious group (a secretive and homicidal gang: part multinational corporation, part crime family) that was sworn to a medieval cult of death, a racist hatred of Jews, a religious frenzy against Hindus, Christians, Shia Muslims, and "unbelievers," and the restoration of a long-vanished and despotic empire."
Great opening paragraph.
"That this was an assault upon our society, whatever its ostensible capitalist and militarist "targets," was again thought too obvious a point for a clever person to make. It became increasingly obvious, though, with every successive nihilistic attack on London, Madrid, Istanbul, Baghdad, and Bali. There was always some "intellectual," however, to argue in each case that the policy of Tony Blair, or George Bush, or the Spanish government, was the "root cause" of the broad-daylight slaughter of civilians. Responsibility, somehow, never lay squarely with the perpetrators."
And yet they were responsible. Making that intellectual point was, apparently, insufficiently nuanced for our "public intellectuals" to bother about considering.
"(I)t is quite probable that those who accept the conventional "narrative" are, at least globally, in a minority. It is not only in the Muslim world that it is commonplace to hear that the events of 9/11 were part of a Jewish or U.S. government plot. And it is not only on the demented fringe that such fantasies circulate in "the West." "
Oddly, while the Zionist-controlled CIA actually is supposed to have been the perpetrator, UBL and the 19 hijackers are somehow, at the same time, to be celebrated as heroes. Odd, that.
(New! Improved! Without that pesky cognitive dissonance!)
"I found myself for the first time in my life sharing the outlook of soldiers and cops, or at least of those soldiers and cops who had not (like George Tenet and most of the CIA) left us defenseless under open skies while well-known "no fly" names were allowed to pay cash for one-way tickets after having done perfunctory training at flight schools. My sympathies were wholeheartedly and unironically (and, I claim, rationally) with the forces of law and order. Second, I became heavily involved in defending my adopted country from an amazing campaign of defamation, in which large numbers of the intellectual class seemed determined at least to minimize the gravity of what had occurred, or to translate it into innocuous terms (poverty is the cause of political violence) that would leave their worldview undisturbed. "
Welcome aboard, for as long as your intellectualism permits you to stay among those more, shall we say, grounded that those who inhabit the lofty reaches of ivory towers.
"I was and remain unreconciled to the stupid, wasteful, oppressive collective punishment of Americans who try to use our civil aviation, or who want to be able to get into their own offices without showing ID to a guard who has no database against which to check it. But I had also seen Abu Ghraib shortly after it was first broken open in 2003, and could have no truck with the moral defectives who talked glibly as if that mini-Auschwitz and mass grave was no worse. When Amnesty International described Guantanamo as "the Gulag of our time," I felt a collapse of seriousness that I have felt many times since."
Not just seriousness, but credibility. Moral equivalency run amok, which is to say, taken to its unserious but logical extreme. Too busy trying to buy credibility among opposing sides, where its currency doesn't, in any case, run. It's not that AI (and other NGOs) haven't done a lot of good, or that they've stopped. It's just that they've forfeited any claim at rationality, at a sense of proportion. Which makes present and future moral claims hard to credit.
"Al-Qaida demands the impossible—worldwide application of the most fanatical interpretation of sharia—and to forward the demand employs the most hysterically irrational means. (This combination, by the way, would make a reasonable definition of "terrorism.") It follows that the resort to panicky or degrading tactics in order to combat terrorism is, as well as immoral, self-defeating.
Ten years ago I wrote to a despairing friend that a time would come when al-Qaida had been penetrated, when its own paranoia would devour it, when it had tried every tactic and failed to repeat its 9/11 coup, when it would fall victim to its own deluded worldview and—because it has no means of generating self-criticism—would begin to implode."
Implosion is the model used to explain the collapse of the USSR, so it's a handy metaphor for intellectuals to use when they want to wish away something unpleasant so that there's no need to get ones hands dirty or to put skin in the game.
"I take this as a part vindication of the superiority of "our" civilization, which is at least so constituted as to be able to learn from past mistakes, rather than remain a prisoner of "faith." "
Nailed that one. This is why I remain confident that revelation-based "faiths" like man-made global warming will be just a passing fad in the West. They too shall pass.
"(A)gainst the tendencies of euphemism and evasion, some stout simplicities deservedly remain. Among them: Holocaust denial is in fact a surreptitious form of Holocaust affirmation."
He continues:
"The regimes of Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fully deserve to be called "evil." And, 10 years ago in Manhattan and Washington and Shanksville, Pa., there was a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form. Let this and other struggles temper and strengthen us for future battles where it will be necessary to repudiate the big lie."
Remember that in Shanksville, the American ethos of doing for oneself, not waiting around for a handout, and being unwilling to go as sheep to the slaughter, ended Al-Qaeda's new secret weapon of converting our own passenger jetliners into cruise missiles. None of TSA's intrusive (and unConstitutional) searches or scans, none of the long lines or insistence on smaller-sized shampoo bottles; none of that holds a candle to the simple fact that American passengers will not permit themselves to be used in this matter. And so, since 9/11, they have not.
